Via an email over the weekend word from Scoble and iPods – “We’ve figured it out, now just gotta convert all the files. Should be done by the end of December.” I guess the flight across the pond really did give you a chance to hit the dregs of your inbox.
I can’t wait to be able to take the ScobleShow video podcasts with me….. But another month? I’d be very interested to know your workflow.
Also noted last week was a nice recap of the first two months of ScobleShow. I can’t believe it’s hit 70 shows without working on an iPod. With that, I’ve probably missed more than 65 ScobleShow’s not being able to have them on my iPod.
Cheers guys.
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During some cleanup of iTunes I came across an MP3 called 48550 and no other details. Instead of just deleting files like this, I started to listen to it. Turns out it was the Penn Jillette’s “Penn Radio” podcast.
I’ve probably been subscribed (through NewNewsWire) to the feed for weeks, and not payed attention to the files being downloaded because I have them automatically fed into iTunes. A podcast with no other details in the ID3 tags beyond some cryptic file filename will never make it beyond being downloaded and trashed. At least the files found their way into the “Unkown Artist” the “Unknown Album” directory with another 1000 plus poorly named files. One day I’ll just delete all these.
I guess I’ll need to move the feed over to iTunes to make up for the content producers shortcomings. I shouldn’t have to.
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After last night I thought I’d try a couple more things to see if I could narrow down my ScobleShow troubles.
Within iTunes, you can try the “convert selection for iPod”, but that didn’t work for me. Next was to pull out MPEG Streamclip and see if I could re-export the original file.
In MPEG Streamclip I chose to export the file as a MPEG-4, clicked the iPod button for the defaults values on the next screen and exported. What do you know. I now have a file that will copy to my iPod. And does.
The exported bit rate is 160 kbps, which differs from the original 80 kbps (as iTunes says).
Not quite the exact process that everyone would want (and I’m sure I degraded quality), but hopefully that gives Scoble a little more to go on.
Needless to say, I won’t be going through this for every new video podcast.
And a blog post is indeed a better method than sending Scoble email. 
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I subscribe to quite a number of video podcasts and watch them on my iPod. I rarely ever watch a video podcast on a computer.
A few weeks back I subscribed through iTunes (since that’s how I manage my video podcasts) to the ScobleShow. I started getting the videos downloaded, and thought all was well. After a couple weeks, I remember that I was subscribed, but the videos have never made it to my iPod. That’s odd. Everything else syncs nicely.
With some free time this afternoon, I sat down to try and figure out why. Tried the unsub/resub route, no luck. Tried manually copying a file over to an existing playlist. No luck. A look at the bit rates of my podcasts. Lots at 64 kbps, lots at 128kbps, but the ScobleShow at 80 kbps?
I did download one of the videos directly (the joys of cable vs. dsl) from Podtech to see if there was any difference. Then add that to my library. No dice. Still the 80 kbps file. The tags on the file directly downloaded don’t list the album or artist, so it will end up in lost among the other poorly named and tagged content. Plus for iTunes is that it reads some of the meta data from the feed and adds that to the file information. We’ve been down this road before.
Turning to Technorati, I came across this post by Charlie Wood that he was having troubles and Scoble was re-encoding the videos.
I am not alone…. But is no one watching the ScobleShow on their iPod?
Bit rates have come up in the past as a trouble point in the moving video content from computer to iPod.
I wonder if once the bit rate is right, will the feed automatically start to sync?
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